Inspiring others (and yourself)

Inspiration

We all need it from time to time. I meet so many inspiring people and love to share what I learning, the people I have met and the things they share with me. If you want me to talk at a conference, let me know the issues which your participants have and how we might want to inspire them.

But, inspire them to to what?

And that’s what I try to do. OK, I have my own story of how I started off in a trick place, and then in September 2014 I suffered a stroke – and despite all that doctors said that ‘”people in his condition tend to make a near normal recovery in about a year” I went on to deliver a 1hour opening key note at a conference of some 500 people – 15 days later.

That’s a story: but so too is the chap I met recently who a few years ago stepped on an IED in Afghanistan and lost both legs and an arm – or the woman who was the brains behind the electrics of the Tesla car, or the woman leading some of the research into the Atlas project, or the male neuroscientist who seems to have solved the issue of the decline in the world’s bee population.

So many of the people I meet, and whose stories form part of what I share (I have met well over 400 such people) have made their achievements despite all the odds being stacked against them. They have dealt with the “It can’t be done” naysayers and gone on to do it.

And unlike many sportspeople, these people have not had a ‘pathfinder’ whose gone before them and whose record they have set out to beat. They are the real game changers, and whose stories are really inspiring.

What really matters, though, is to keep the inspiration going. To make it stick.
I get mails from people who tell me that ‘I inspired them many years ago’. How they remember me, me name or what I did I don;t know. But clearly something does stick.